The Whitney Museum houses one
of the world's foremost collections of twentieth-century American
art. The Permanent Collection of some 12,000 works encompasses
paintings, sculptures, multimedia installations, drawings, prints,
and photographs- and is still growing. The Museum was founded
in 1931 with a core group of 700 art objects, many of them from
the personal collection of founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney;
others were purchased by Mrs. Whitney at the time of the opening
to provide a more thorough overview of American art in the early
decades of the century. Mrs. Whitney favored the art of the revolutionary
artists derisively called the Ashcan School, among them John Sloan,
George Luks, and Everett Shinn, as well as realists such as Edward
Hopper and American Scene painters John Steuart Curry and Thomas
Hart Benton. Her initial gift, however, also comprised many important
works by early modernists- Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Charles
Sheeler, Max Weber, and others. Virtually all the works collected
by the Museum for the next twenty years came through the generosity
of Mrs. Whitney.
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